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Rhetoric and reality
The Arab League Summit has convened just as the region reached the
summit of instability, division and violence as a result of the actions
of many of those and other Middle Eastern leaders. But don't expect Arab
leaders to take responsibility for the dreadful situation they helped
bring about - absolutely not.
Instead, much of the blame was directed at "external" forces and the
extremists and the terrorists who, in the words of Egyptian President
Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, exploited certain "shortcomings" of Arab
governance (i.e. repressive authoritarianism) to try and gain control.

Unity in action against the IS is the spur for Kurdish unity

South of Kobane, Syria, on March 21, the Islamic State
(IS) confronted the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the
Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga. Western bombers continued to hit IS
targets, although these raids did not seem to stop the ferocious attacks
from IS against the Kurdish positions. Both sides claim small
victories, but these are minor skirmishes. Last year, rapid IS advances
drew their fighters deep into Syrian Kurdish territory, with the virtual
seizure of Kobane by September. Kurdish fighters, with Western air
support, pushed IS out of Kobane by the end of January — but they could
not remove IS from the Kurdish regions that border Turkey.Read more-

Politicians dutifully disclose their increasing assets at each
election but no questions are ever asked about how they acquired this
wealth nor are any explanations provided

“Study these four men washing down the steps of this unpalatable Bombay
hotel. The first pours water from a bucket, the second scratches the
tiles with a twig broom, the third uses a rag to slop the dirty water
down the steps into another bucket, which is held by the fourth. After
they have passed, the steps are as dirty as before… They are not
required to clean,” but simply to execute an assigned duty. V.S.
Naipaul’s famous remarks in his early work An Area of Darkness
aptly describes the sheer futility of the ritual disclosures of assets
by election candidates.

The rhetoric on the dangers posed by Syrian chemical weapons is
similar to the false charges trumped up against Iraq in the run-up to
the 2003 U.S.-led invasion

For legions of well networked field activists, think tank strategists,
intelligence operatives and hands-on diplomats who have been plotting
the termination of Syrian President Bashar Al Assad’s regime, Wednesday
(July 18) was a day to remember. That fateful day, a powerful bomb — the
jury is still out on whether it was triggered by a suicide bomber or
planted by an insider — ripped through the interiors of the
high-security National Security Bureau in Damascus, where a top secret
meeting was under way. The blast decapitated the Syrian security
establishment; Defence Minister Dawoud Rajha was killed as was Assef
Shawkat, his deputy who was also President Assad’s brother-in-law. The
deadly strike also claimed the life of Hassan Turkmani, a former Defence
Minister and point man who was steering the fight against the
anti-regime revolt. A couple of days later, the badly wounded Hisham
Ikhtiyar, National Security Adviser to the President, also succumbed to
his injuries.

In late June, when Iranian Vice President Mohammad Reza Rahimi spouted
anti-Semitic comments at a Tehran forum marking International Day
Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking, his offensive rhetoric was
rightfully ridiculed and condemned. Rahimi declared his belief that the
Talmud,
the central holy scripture of Judaism, "teaches [Jews] how to destroy
non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother", and
also to "destroy everyone who opposes the Jews". Jews, according to
Rahimi, "think God has created the world so that all other nations can
serve them".

A ‘Mormon foreign policy’ would actually be good for America and great for the world, but it won’t happen

As the world prepares to face another United States presidential
election — one in which President Barack Obama is the front-runner but
not a shoo-in by a long-shot — governments and analysts across the
globe, including in India, must ask themselves what the likely foreign
and national security policies of America’s first ‘Mormon’ White House
under Mitt Romney might look like.

Early on the morning of December 18, 1995, residents of Khatanga, a small West Bengal hamlet, finally summoned the courage to step out of their homes and examine the strange gifts that had dropped from the skies through the night. Boxes were scattered across the fields, witnesses told investigators, enveloped in giant pieces of cloth later identified as parachutes. Local residents had helped themselves to the arsenal, but police eventually located over 150 assault rifles, rocket launchers, grenades, anti-tank rockets and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Indians have been wondering whom to blame for the paralysis that has afflicted their government for the last two years. Time magazine’s cover picture of Manmohan Singh, captioned “The Underachiever”, seems to have made up their minds for them. But granted that Dr. Singh is not a natural leader can one ever, justifiably, pin the blame for the collapse of an entire governmental system on a single person?

In Dr. Singh’s case we need to look all the harder for other explanations because he is the same person who piloted a painless transition from a command to a market economy and, a decade later, brokered the coalition with Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party — in the teeth of opposition from the Indian intelligence agencies — that gave the Kashmiris the first government they felt they could call their own. This began the marginalisation of militant separatism in the Valley.

In a democracy, the remedy for a malfunctioning legislature and executive must come from the people, not the judiciary

It is evident that the Pakistan Supreme Court has embarked on a perilous
path of confrontation with the political authorities, which can only
have disastrous consequences for the country. Recently its Chief Justice
said that the Constitution, not Parliament, is supreme. This is
undoubtedly settled law since the historical decision of the U.S.
Supreme Court in Marbury vs. Madison (1803).

The Guwahati incident shows that journalists do not always adhere to
the ethical standards of behaviour that they demand of others

I remember watching “The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club,”
an American documentary about the suicide of South African
photojournalist Kevin Carter, at a film festival organised by my law
school in 2010. The documentary that was nominated for the Academy
Awards depicts the gut-wrenching tale of Carter’s enduring depression by
the carnage he witnessed as a photographer in warzones.

A cure for India’s health care ills is within reach provided there is political will

In most developed — and many developing — countries today, a 12-year
school education and universal health coverage (UHC) are the two primary
responsibilities of the state. India has failed miserably on both
counts. Let us look at some of the problems of medical and health care:

• Fifty years ago, when there was no commercialisation of medicare that
we have today, we had only government hospitals or those run by trusts
as public service. There weren’t enough of them but they provided
excellent medical and health care (medicare) by dedicated professionals.
Today, the government hospitals are a shambles.

By excising dissenting views from its report, the cartoon committee has acted worse than colonial era panels

The debate over the cartoons used in NCERT textbooks as
aids to learning have thrown up a range of issues. The discussion has
crystallised around a set of oppositions: motivated political
correctness of our elected representatives vs. the necessity of
preemptory parliamentary intervention on educational material
appropriate for schools; institutional autonomy vs. political
responsibility of a state presiding over a diverse and fraught society;
the hubris of ‘experts’ vs. the right of others to feel hurt, in this
case on solid rational grounds; the smugness of elite and upper caste
votaries of a new pedagogy vs. the claims of those at the receiving end
of Hindu society (and history) to articulate unfamiliar adversarial
intellectual positions; the celebration of the enabling learning curve
of the ‘average’ schoolchild vs. the violence inflicted precisely by
such homogenisations on the radically different life experiences of
children from disadvantaged groups; the blindness of India’s ‘left
liberals’ ensconced in their stockades vs. the insights of Dalit writers
and academics.

Mohammed Mursi arrived in Saudi Arabia today on his first official international visit as President of Egypt.

President Mursi ─ who has also received an invitation from U.S.
President Barak Obama to visit America when he attends the United
Nations’ General Assembly (UNGA) in September ─ met with King Abdullah
bin Abdulaziz.

According to analysts, the meeting was intended to imply the continuity
of bilateral relations between the two states, regardless of who is in
power.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been
long-time regional allies during the reign of ousted President Hosni
Mubarak; however, given the fact that the Brotherhood’s relations with
Riyadh has had its ups and downs in the past, questions were raised
around the future of relations between the two countries following the
election of the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mursi.

The region still has some distance to go on democracy as seen in the hurried impeachment in Paraguay

The questionable removal of President Fernando Lugo of
Paraguay by the country’s Senate, nine months before the end of his
five-year-term in April 2013, raises questions about the state of
democracy in South America, much as the coup in Honduras did three years
ago for Central America. For a region with a recent transition to
democracy, this is worrisome. For a country like Paraguay, dominated
until 2008 by 61 years of uninterrupted rule by the Colorado party of
General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989), that veritable archetype of the
Latin American dictator, this is especially so.

The Syrian crisis continues to grow worse, with Hilary Clinton
now threatening Russia and China of “paying a price” if they continue
to “support” Bashar al Assad in Syria. This is a scant few days after
nine-party Action Group meeting in Geneva, where both sides
agreed to a political solution in Syria. Promptly, the two sides – the
American and Russian came out with two different interpretations to the
agreement; the US claimed it meant a transitional government
incorporating both sides but without Assad, while the Russian
interpreted it to mean a transitional government which would contain
both sides, the question
of Assad being left to the Syrians to decide. For the Americans, any
agreement on Syria must start with a regime change, a goal with which
the Russians and Chinese do not agree.

Journalists need to adopt a set of integrity measures in order to police the boundaries between the market and political power

Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person and the world’s wealthiest
woman, is seeking three board seats following her purchase of 18.7 per
cent of Fairfax which owns most papers in Australia not controlled by
Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd. There has already been considerable upheaval
in two of the Fairfax papers serving Melbourne and Sydney with a 25 per
cent shedding of journalists to cut costs.

Influence-peddling

Unsustainable import competition and the end of the investment
subsidy that the sale of under-priced resources provided to Indian
companies are the main reasons why the economy has slowed down

What has been called the ‘golden age’ of India’s economic growth was
underpinned by global integration, high rates of investment and savings
growth and low current account deficits. The slowdown is characterised
by a sharp deceleration in investment growth on the demand side and in
agriculture, manufacturing and construction on the supply side,
alongside high and unprecedented current account deficits.

The government’s argument that this is the result of the global economic
slowdown and related uncertainty is only partly true. The deeper
reason, which the government is either unwilling or unable to come to
grips with, is the unravelling of the underlying growth model — partly
due to structural change engendered by globalisation and partly because
the investment subsidy implicit in under-pricing assets is no longer
feasible.

THE AAMIR KHAN COLUMN To be a cohesive team, and to have a
common, shared vision, we have to start by first accepting that we have
built up differences, walls, barriers.

In a number of ways, Gandhiji was different from other freedom fighters
and leaders of the time. One difference was that he gave equal
importance to one more fight along with the struggle for independence,
and that is, the emancipation of those ostracised as “untouchables.”
Gandhiji’s work against untouchability began in South Africa around five
decades before our independence. After his return to India, an incident
at his Kochrab Ashram near Ahmedabad shows us how much importance he
gave to the concept of equality between castes.---Read Full Story